Data Sharing in a Large Heterogeneous Environment

Abstract:

The increased availability of networking technology, as well as the economic pressure for inter-company cooperation have created a great deal of interest in federated (or heterogeneous) database systems. Although there has been much work recently in this area, most of it addresses (implicitly or explicitly)
an environment in which there are only relatively few cooperating entities. In this paper we explore the issues involved in sharing information among a large collection of independent databases. First, we discuss some of the distinguishing features that characterize such large scale environments (such as
size, autonomy, and heterogeneity). We then outline a multi-step information sharing process for those systems, and present an architecture supporting that exchange. We conclude by providing a detailed description of a working prototype based on our architecture, and present some measurements of its
performance.